Rogers: U.S. ‘Losing’ Cyber War

'We’ve Gone From Cold War To The Code War'

DENNIS KNEALE: A decade ago when I was managing editor of Forbes magazine, we ran a cover story warning about the next cyber attack, to rail systems that none of them were bulletproofed against hacker invasions. It’s a decade later and it feels like we still aren’t nearly ready enough. Now, here we’ve got opponents to your information sharing bill because it upset the government might get a hold of some person’s name, yet I feel like Washington isn’t going to respond quickly enough until we have some major crisis, some major invasion. Are you getting at all concerned we aren’t getting the job done of protecting these networks?

MIKE ROGERS: Well, absolutely. We are in — let me rephrase that. We’ve gone from the cold war to the code war. We’re in this cyber war and we’re losing. So we’re losing intellectual property at a breath taking pace from countries like china, countries like Iran who are aggressively probing U.S. financial services networks and others to try to cause that chaos, who are mapping out electric grids and nuclear plants and other things for that potential cyber attack. You can watch it happening and we have not done enough to act. The problem is, people don’t see it. It’s that unseen war. You’re on the computer and the computer is working fine. You don’t get the connection. That’s the real problem here.